great though it be; the mocking ripple of the
rivulet, the roaring of the calves, these were
the music of the Fenii. I have not heard
music so good as this of Nature from the
beginning of the great world up to this time;
I am aged, gloomy, and grey-headed, and my
regard is not towards the clerks on hills.
O Patrick, hard is thy service, and shameful
is it for you to reproach me for my appearance;
if Fionn lived, and the Fenii, I would
forsake the clergy of the cross. The small
dwarf who attended Fionn had paltry bones;
yet he played melodiously on the harp, whilst
I am here in grief with the clergy. Then
Oisin proceeds to magnify his past enjoyments,
and St. Patrick replies as becomes his office,
but Oisin cries, Little do I believe in thy
speech, thou man from Rome with white
boots, that Fionn the generous hero is now
with demons and devils. Upon this subject
the bard and the saint argue together stoutly,
and there are some touches of a fine pathos
in Oisin's pleading on behalf of the dead
heroes. He counts as equal to eternal torture
one day only in company with clergy of the
bells. He tells Patrick the great story of
the Battle of the Hill of Slaughter, which
ended the wars of the Fenii, which ended the
life of his son, high-minded Osgar of the
weighty strokes. Patrick blends compliment
with a remorseless condemnation of the souls
of heroes; Oisin, at his repeated request, tells
of the blows struck by hero upon hero, and
of the words spoken by the men of battle.
The narrative is long and full of incident; in
fact, a Celtic novel, as related by the bards.
When all has been told, the argument is
resumed, and presently again breaks off, while
Oisin, who sings pertinaciously of Fionn and
the Fenii relates to the saint the magic tale
of Fionn's chase; the argument grows hot
again, till Oisin, mentioning the time of the
enchantment of Fionn and the Fenii, St.
Patrick calls upon him for that song, and gets
it. When it is finished, Oisin again pleads
for the Fenii, and begs Saint Patrick to
forsake the clergy, and conduct the heroes into
heaven. Being reprimanded, the bard
promises to talk of Fenii no more, and is rewarded
by receiving meat from the saint's
housekeeper, which he supposes to be sent direct
from the Eternal City. The starved poet
being refreshed, talks of the Fenii again, and
labours cunningly to get St. Patrick's promise
that he will talk with him about them when
in heaven, in a discreet whisper. The saint
declares that even a whisper would be heard;
and at last the old man meekly declares that
he is prepared to march speedily towards the
youthful city. The poem thus tells of the
last days of the bard of Erin: Portentous
danger from death did come full severely on
Oisin for a time; alas! then he had no
attachment left for the mighty Osgar, nor for
Fionn of the hosts. Memory nor sense
remained in his head; his eyes were blind,
suffering sorrow: torn was that merry,
magnanimous heart, which had been mighty in
battles of weighty hosts.

To Feargus Fibheoil, chief bard of Fionn,
are attributed many of the extant songs upon
the battles of the Fenii. He was praised
always as the truly-ingenious, the superior-
in-knowledge, the skilled in the choice of
words, by succeeding Celtic poets. He is
especially remembered for the songs with which
he animated warriors during the heat of
battle.

Our Celts clung to their bards, and gave
them honourable place long after Druids were
no more, and it was of course from lip to lip
that their songs passed, until men lived who
had the magic art of fining them on paper.
In the annals compiled by Tigernach, in the
eleventh century, and extant still, live many
ancient Bardic Songs and Legendary Histories;
others appear in the annals of the Five
Masters, and in such local records as the
Annals of Ulster and Innisfallen. There
survives also a legendary collection called
the Psalter of Cashel, written at the close
of the ninth century. The Scottish Celts
have not a written literature equally
venerable for its age, but the metrical Albania
Duan, a historical and of course bardic and
legendary poem, is said to belong to the
eleventh century. The transcripts of the
songs of the Welsh bards cannot be traced
with certainty to a date earlier than the 12th
century, but there can be little doubt that
from the harp of Taliesin a few genuine
strains yet echo among the hills. Fragments
of written Welsh exist which may be referred
to the tenth, or possibly even the ninth
century, but they are simply glosses upon
previously existing manuscripts, written probably
by some of the first Welsh monks, in the
native tongue. The oldest of these, for
example, are glosses on a portion of the treatise
of Eutychius, the grammarian, and some
others are on the text of Ovid's Art of Love.

Of the laws of Howel Dda, compiled in
the tenth century, the oldest manuscript
belongs to the twelfth century. That also is
the period of the oldest known manuscript
containing songs of the Welsh bards, in a
volume called the Black Book of Caermarthen.
It contains a Dialogue between
Myrddin (Merlin) and Taliesin; the Graves
of the Warriors; the Predictions of Merlin
from his Grave; and eight or ten
miscellaneous songs and elegies. The greater
number of the poems ascribed to Taliesin
were not reduced to writing till a century or
two later, when they were set down in the
Red Book of Hergest, six hundred years
after the supposed date of their composition.
The Red Book of Hergest, in the library of
Jesus College, Oxford, contains more than
seven hundred pages, and is written in
double columns. Its last pages were written
in the fifteenth century, the rest certainly
not earlier than the fourteenth. Nearly
two-thirds of the remains left to us by